Capitalist entities use culture wars as a distraction from the class struggle because it diverts attention away from economic disparities. By emphasizing social and cultural differences, the focus shifts from addressing systemic inequalities and exploitation inherent in capitalism. This diversion can maintain the status quo and prevent solidarity among different socio-economic classes, hindering collective efforts to challenge the power structures that perpetuate economic inequality.
Clipping
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web > Culture wars are a distraction from economic inequality
[https://mastodon.social/@Radical_EgoCom/111669484542778425]
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web > Psychedelics do not cause hallucinations
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/18ixijv/psychedelics_do_not_cause_hallucinations_but/]
Psychedelics do not cause hallucinations, but increased sensory sensitivity
For understanding the psychedelic experience, it’s important to understand that there is fellacy [sic] around thinking that our sober mind somehow sees the actual real world. It’s an abstraction made from data. Sober world is abstraction, LSD world is abstraction, DMT world is abstraction. The only thing that differentiates those states is how related they are to sensory inputs from the environment.
Psychedelics, however, give us some quality for the price of the functionality. After ingesting psychedelic, there is now more data that is processed and included in creating a subjective reality, as if our picture of the world went from lower to higher quality, ‘1080p to 4K.’ Subjective perception wasn’t guided by evolutionary pressure to give us the most accurate, highest resolution reality perception, but the highest possible ‘resolution’ that maintains constant fluidity of the experience without the stutter.
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books > The Glass Hotel: A novel (Emily St. John Mandel)
the late fifties, when Jonathan Alkaitis’s brother was looking for models. In the summer of 2008, Olivia stood across the street under a red awning because it was obviously about to rain, eating a chocolate chip cookie even though the sugar would send her to sleep later—on a bench, in the subway, in a movie theater, wherever
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web > Academia is a crumbling tower
[https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/remembering-things-that-havent-happened]
At 22 I started an MFA program in fiction writing because I was going to pen the great American novel, then maybe get a PhD in creative writing, which would inevitably win me a tenured professorship (it was 2008 when you could almost plausibly still believe things like this). I’d wind up in a cute college town with four seasons and crunching fall leaves under my boots and live a cozy, creative life. A year later it dawned on me that academia was a crumbling tower, the people in my MFA program were curiously incurious about reading and writing, and how I imagined things might work was not how any of this was going to work. I fled.
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web > If you are ill
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38636640]
Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca’s Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]:
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes. You have something to do: wrestle bravely with disease. If it shall compel you to nothing, beguile you to nothing, it is a notable example that you display. O what ample matter were there for renown, if we could have spectators of our sickness! Be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
And if you have lost, or are losing, someone you love, read Letter 63 [1]:
So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: “The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed.” If we take the word of Attalus for it, “to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?”
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web > Variety in life is fractal, not just travel and drugs
[https://www.avabear.xyz/p/talking-to-sasha-chapin-about-unconventional]
“I think complexity is fractal and you can find it anywhere when you become interested in something. I use to associate a complex and varied life with adventure, broadly construed, like travel and drugs and eating different things, pushing yourself in various ways. And now I think complexity can be found anywhere … One of the things that can make a life worth living is finding the complexity that you’re interested in and continuing to pursue that.”
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
When we overprotect, when we become so neurotic about the perfection of our children’s every experience and waking moment, we don’t protect them from sliding along the behavioral spectrum. We push them along it.
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
By overprotecting them we may make their lives safer (that is, fever free) in the short run, but in the long run we would be leaving them vulnerable, less able to cope with the world around them.
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web > Did I miss anything
Poem 013: Did I Miss Anything?
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth 40 percent of the grade for this term and assigned some reading due today on which I’m about to hand out a quiz worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what each woman or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter This is the last time the class will meet before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom is a microcosm of human experience assembled for you to query and examine and ponder This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here
— Tom Wayman